Saturday, January 25, 2014

THE ROHINGYA PEOPLE: THE MOST SUFFERING PEOPLE ON EARTH

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
was adopted by the United Nations 65 years ago in December of 1948.The U.S. didn’t ratify the Genocide Convention for another 40 years.The late Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, took up the
task in the 1960s of getting the convention ratified. He assumed it would be
easy. But it was not. He ended up giving 3,211 speeches on the floor of the Senate,
a different speech every day for 19 years, until it was ratified.

It took two more years before President Ronald Reagan finally signed the
measure into law on Nov. 5, 1988 — in a hangar at O’Hare Airport in Chicago.

After the Jewish Holocaust in Europe, the world said “never again,” but
the list of genocides since then is long and sorrowful: Cambodia in the 1970s,
nearly 2 million dead; Rwanda in 1994, 800,000 dead; Bosnia in the 1990s, 250,000
dead; Chechnya between the years 1994 and 2000, nearly 250,000 dead, 200,000
missing and 500,000 – nearly half the population internally displaced; Democratic
Republic of the Congo an estimated 6 million people have perished in the past
20 years. In George W. Bush’s wars, 20,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan
in 2001 alone, and another 655,000 to one million in Iraq between 2003 and
2006, which can only be described as war crimes.

And how about Myanmar, also known as Burma? And how about its Rohingya
people, who are recognized by the UN as one the most persecuted people on earth?

The Rohingya people of Myanmar, who
mostly live in the western part - the Rakhine (formerly Arakan) state,
bordering the Muslim-majority Bangladesh, are undoubtedly the most suffering
people in our time. As it has become almost a norm in the Thein Sein era, earlier this month at least 48 Muslims were massacred when Rakhine Buddhist mobs attacked Du
Chee Yar Tan, a village in the Rakhine state. This violence, part of the
on-going genocidal activities against the Rohingya people appears to be the
deadliest in a year.

Navi
Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said she had received
credible information that eight Rohingya Muslim men were attacked and killed in
Du Chee Yar Tan village by local Rakhine Buddhists on January 9. This was
followed by a clash on January 13 in the same village, following the reported
kidnapping and killing of a police sergeant by Rohingya residents. Police did
nothing to stop a Buddhist mob that entered later that night with knives,
sticks and swords, witnesses and rights groups said.

The village has been emptied and sealed
off since the massacre.The humanitarian aid group, Medicins san Frontiers, or
Doctors Without Borders, which has several clinics in the area, said it has
treated at least 22 patients, including several wounded, who are believed to be
victims of the violence.

The
United Nations has called on the government to carry out a swift, impartial
investigation and to hold those responsible accountable. Pillay said, "By
responding to these incidents quickly and decisively, the government has an
opportunity to show transparency and accountability, which will strengthen
democracy and the rule of law in Myanmar."

While the government agencies inside
Myanmar have mastered the Goebbels-style propaganda in undercounting the casualty
figures, let alone denying such extermination campaigns, the undeniable fact is
more than a quarter million Rohingyas have fled their homes since May of 2012.
It is probably this exodus of the Rohingya people which is both emboldening and
encouraging the rogue regime and its savage, murderous Buddhist mob to get rid
of the Muslim population one way or another.

Denied citizenship in this Buddhist
majority country, the Rohingyas have simply become the most unwanted people in
our planet. The nearby Bangladesh does not want the persecuted Rohingyas to
settle there either. In desperate attempts to save their lives, many Rohingyas
have become now the ‘boat people’ of our time!

Yet Myanmar has gone through a change in
recent years. The former military general Thein Sein is the poster-boy of
reform inside the country. With him as the head of the state, a
quasi-civil-military government runs the fractured country. Myanmar had its
election, too – an imperfect one – in which some opposition politicians had
managed to get elected in the limited seats available to them within the
parliament. The new regime has also released many political prisoners (mostly
Buddhists) who were once rotting in many of Myanmar’s notorious dungeons. [Many
released ones have since been re-imprisoned.] In reaction to such ‘positive
image-building’ initiatives, which I call calculated gimmicks, the western
world has reciprocated by lifting its political and economic sanctions against
the once hated military dictatorship that has ruled the country for almost its
entire life since earning independence from Britain in January 4 of 1948.

There was much expectation – probably too
unrealistic and too premature – that the Thein Sein government was serious
about ‘real’ reform and that the Rohingyas will be integrated as citizens at
par with other ethnic/national groups inside Myanmar. What we have witnessed
instead is worsening of their situations. They are now victims of a highly
organized genocidal campaign in which even Buddhists like Aung Saan Suu Kyi –
touted one-time as the democracy icon – are sadly, either silent or willing
partners in this gross violation of human rights. Since May of 2012 an
estimated 250,000 Rohingyas have fled their homes. Tens of thousands of Muslims
living in other parts of Myanmar have also been victims of organized mob
violence, lynching, and wholesale destruction of their homes, schools, mosques
and businesses. Many of the Muslim Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) now live
in squalid camps with no provisions and are counting their days hopelessly to
be relocated to their burned homes. And yet, such a provision seems unlikely.
In recent days, Rakhine Buddhists have organized demonstrations protesting any
resettlement of the Rohingya and other Muslims. Bottom line – they want the
Rohingya and other Muslims out of Myanmar, if not total annihilated.

What is worse, the international NGOs,
esp. from the Muslim countries, continue to be barred from helping out the
Muslim victims. In the face of reported protests from the Rakhine Buddhist
community, the Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC) could not even open an
office to carry out its much needed humanitarian relief work in the troubled
region.

Many international observers and some
experts, including human rights activists, were surprised by such outbreaks of
ethnic cleansing drives last year against the Muslims, in general, and the
Rohingya people, in particular, let alone the level of Buddhist intolerance
against non-Buddhists everywhere inside Myanmar. However, such sad episodes
were no surprise to many keen observers and researchers of the Myanmar’s
problematic history.

In 2007 when I was invited as the chief
guest and keynote speaker in an international conference on the Rohingyas of
Burma, held in Tokyo, Japan, its theme was the prevalent xenophobia in Myanmar
and how to address the issue so that people of all ethnic and religious
backgrounds could live harmoniously. One after another the speakers spoke at
length about the danger that they foresaw. We all knew that simply a transition
to so-called democracy would not and could not solve the Rohingya problem.
Instead of a much-needed dialogue for reconciliation and confidence-building
between ethnic/national and religious groups, what we recognized and faced from
the so-called ‘democracy’ leaders within the Burmese and Rakhine Diaspora was appalling
Buddhist chauvinism. They would not talk with or listen to the Rohingya people;
as if, their so-called struggle for democracy against the hated military regime
was a purely Buddhist one, the Rohingya Muslims were unwelcome in those
dialogues between ethnic/national groups.

The level of Buddhist intolerance, hatred
and xenophobia had simply no parallel in our time! Those chauvinist Buddhists
were in denial of the very existence of the Rohingya people, in spite of the
fact that the latter group comprised more than a third of the population of the
Rakhine State and that the ancestors of the Rohingya were the first settlers in
the crescent of Arakan before others moved in. While the vast majority of the
late comers to the contested territory were Buddhists, the Rohingyas, much like
the people living next door – on the other side of the Naaf River – in today’s
Bangladesh had embraced Islam voluntarily. Their conversion had also much to do
with the history of the entire region, esp. in the post-13th century
when the Sultans and the great Mughal Emperors ruled vast territories of the
South Asia from the foothills of the Himalayas to the shores of the Indian
Ocean.

As a matter of fact, the history of
Arakan, sandwiched then between Muslim-dominated India and Buddhist-dominated
Burma, would have been much different had it not been for the crucial decision
made by the Muslim Sultan of Bengal who reinstalled the fleeing Buddhist king
Narameikhtla to the throne of Arakan in 1430 with a massive Muslim force of
nearly 60,000 soldiers – sent in two campaigns. Interestingly, the Muslim
General Wali Khan – leading a force of 25,000 soldiers, who was instructed to
put the fleeing monarch to the throne of Arakan – had claimed it for himself.
He was subsequently uprooted in a new campaign - again at the directive of the
Sultan of Muslim Bengal - by General Sandi Khan who led a force of 35,000
soldiers. What would be Arakan’s history today if the Muslim Sultan of Bengal
had let General Wali Khan to rule the country as his client?

We need not change the course of history.
But is it wrong to expect human rights for all that are enshrined in the UN? Sadly,
not a single of the 30 clauses of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is
honored by the apartheid Myanmar regime when it comes to its treatment of this
unfortunate people. What is more shocking is the emerging fact that the
so-called democracy leaders within the Buddhist opposition in Burma have very
little, if any, in common with the core values and ideals of democracy.
Instead, their behavior has repeatedly shown that they are closet fascists and are
no democrats. Thus, all the efforts of the Rohingya and other non-Buddhist
minority groups to reach out to the exiled Buddhist-dominated opposition
leadership in the pre-Thein Sein era simply failed. It was an ominous warning
for the coming days!

So in 2012 when the region witnessed a
series of highly orchestrated ethnic cleansing drives against the Rohingya and
other Muslim groups not just within the Rakhine state but all across Myanmar,
like some keen observers of the political developments there I was not too
surprised. Nor was I amazed with the divisive role played by leaders of the
so-called democracy movement. They showed their real fascist color. But the
level of ferocity, savagery and inhumanity simply stunned me! I could not
believe what I was witnessing. It showed that the Theravada Buddhists of
Myanmar, like their co-religionists in Sri Lanka and Cambodia, have become the
worst racists and bigots of our time. With the evolving incendiary and poisonous
role of Buddhist monks like Wirathu - the abbot of historically influential
Mandalay Ma-soe-yein monastery and his 969 Fascist Movement, which sanctifies
eliminationist policies against the Muslims, surely, the teachings of Gautama
Buddha have miserably failed to enlighten them and/or put a lid on their all
too obvious savagery and monstrosity.

On June 20, 2013 twelve Nobel Peace
Laureates called upon the Myanmar government for ending violence against Muslims
in Burma. They also called for an international independent investigation of
the anti-Muslim violence. Yet, the Myanmar regime continues to ignore
international plea for integration of the Rohingya and other minorities.

So the plight of the Rohingya and other Muslim
minorities continues unabated inside apartheid Myanmar. In ethnic cleansing
drives in this country, the victims are usually the Rohingyas and yet they end
up in the prisons (and not the Buddhist marauders) overwhelmingly. A peaceful
demonstration may cost them their lives in this Mogher Mulluk. The same security forces
which did nothing to stop lynching of Muslim victims have no moral qualms in
killing them unprovoked for staging a peaceful demonstration. Genocide of the
Rohingyas is a national project in Myanmar. It is, therefore, no surprise that ignoble
Aung Saan Suu Kyi is an endorser to this horrendous crime through her wilful
silence to condemning it.

A reading of history shows that genocide succeeds when state sovereignty
blocks international responsibility to protect its persecuted group. It
continues due to lack of authoritative international institutions to predict it
and call it as such. It happens due to lack of ready rapid response forces to
stop it and lack of political will to peacefully prevent it and to forcefully
intervene to stop it.

Since founding of the UN, at least 45 genocides and politicides have
taken place in our world resulting in deaths of some 70 million people. It is a
shameful record that needs to be improved.

Let’s
not allow the UN to add another genocide to its shameful record of failures that
either overlooked it or tried to intervene when it was too late! It must stop
the war criminals in Myanmar from their genocidal crimes against the Rohingyas.

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About Me

I have a long history of a peaceful activist in my effort towards improving human rights and creating a just and equitable world. I have written extensively in the arena of humanity, global politics, social conscience and human rights since 1980, many of which have appeared in newspapers, magazines, journals and the Internet. I have tirelessly championed the cause of the disadvantaged, the poor and the forgotten here in Americas and abroad. Commenting on my articles, others have said, "His meticulously researched essays and articles combined with real human dimensions on the plight of the displaced peoples of Rohingya in Myanmar, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo and Palestine, and American Muslims in the post-9/11 era have made him a singular important intellectual offering a sane voice with counterpoints to the shrill threats of the oppressors and the powerful. He offers a fresh and insightful perspective on a whole generation of a misunderstood and displaced people with little or no voice of their own." I have authored 13 books, 10 of which are now available through the Amazon.com.